High light yield Ce3+-doped dense scintillating glasses

Abstract

Dense scintillating glasses containing 15 mol% BaF2 and different molar concentrations of heavy rare earth metal oxides Gd 2O3, Lu2O3, La2O 3 activated by Ce3+ are studied. Absorption, excitation, and luminescence spectra are presented. Mechanisms of these glasses are discussed. We observed that energy transfer from Gd3+ to Ce 3+ plays an important role in the scintillation mechanism of these glasses and the optimum concentration of Gd2O3 is found to be approximately 15%. Also, increasing the concentration of Lu 2O3 and La2O3 appears can increase the scintillation light yield and the glass density. The highest integrated light emission intensity of these glass samples excited by X-ray is 87% of BGO and the decay time constants are in the range of 30-40 ns, much shorter than the 300 ns decay time of BGO. The 15 mol% BaF2, which replaces lighter compounds SiO2 and B2O3 as one of the important ingredients of the oxyfluoride glasses that we studied, can increase the density of the glasses and also improve the light yield. Densities of glass samples that we made are from 5.1 to 6.2 g/cm3. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.